My self-sustaining pets, the finches. The beautiful Gold Finches.

A very kind reader of the Newburyport Blog emailed me a while back, to let me know that, no, my self-sustaining pets, the Gold Finches, actually stick around for the winter, they don’t fly on South.

Cool.

Love this.

Apparently the males turn from a bright yellow to a muted grey.

So instead of dumping out the finch food the way I do every fall, I filled the finch feeder back up to see what would happen.

Low and behold, a few days later, there were a couple of very drab (sorry guys) birds pecking away. They were so drab that they were difficult to tell them apart from the less than swanky or colorful finch feeder.

I can tell when the finches have been hanging around, because the finch food all of a sudden starts to get low. But, alas, the finch food has not.

So, I go and talk to the bird feeder fellow out at the traffic circle (the place where the policeman stopped me for being too aggressive, trying to enter the traffic circle– see earlier entry). And yes indeed, the kind reader of the Newburyport Blog is correct, the finches stick around. According to the finch feeder fellow, some of his clients have feeders that are swarming with drab winter Gold Finches.

Not at my house, however. And no answer to this — the mystery of no finches.

It can’t be because they don’t like my cooking, because what I’m serving up to the finches, who aren’t showing up, is all store-bought stuff.

Mary Eaton
Newburyport